Cosmonauts Lane

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I USUALLY have a good sense of navigation, but not underground travelling through a metro system. Additionally, I couldn’t read the Cyrillic alphabet used in the Russian language. Some of the alphabet symbols were completely unfamiliar – looking more like Greek letters, like the upside-down y and the mu symbols. Navigating Moscow’s complex metro system would have been a nightmare if I didn’t have my guide Pavel.

Underground metro station

We headed into the dark Leninskiy Prospekt metro station illuminated only by a row of florescent tubes on either side of the cavern above the square pillars. Pavel led me into one of the trains and we took a seat – too early for rush hour at this stage. Most of the seats were occupied with people all silently staring at their smart phones blanked faced in the same zombie manner as they do in Australasia. This seems to be a global phenomenon now.

At the other end of the carriage a man was going from passenger to passenger with a bag of goodies to sell. Surprisingly they seemed quite receptive to him, with several buying his merchandise.

We travelled a few stations, climbed out, and walked through a maze of tunnels to another station where we caught another train and headed some distance through the network before Pavel led me out at VDNK Station.

Yuri Gagarin statue

The caverns of the station were cylindrical shaped, including the small tunnels linking them. We walked to the end and took the escalator up to the surface. We were in amongst a maze of high rise apartment buildings, all uniformly standing fifteen to twenty storeys high, all uniformly long and narrow, all of the same design from the Soviet era. In the distance some blocks away was the very tall Ostankinsky Television Tower standing about half a kilometre high.

The station was next to a very busy multi lane road. We walked about a hundred metres to a traffic light and crossed over when the lights finally changed, heading towards a park with lots of big deciduous trees.

Passing the first row of trees we reached a paved area perhaps eight metres wide and extending quite a long way to the right to a very tall lopsided needle-like structure. We walked onto the paving and started walking towards the tall structure, climbing a few steps. We had reached Cosmonauts Lane.

Rocket tower

The lane was lined with a row of low street lamps on either side at the start of a lawn heading across to the trees just starting to change colour with the autumn. After a few metres, the paving became split in two with a narrow garden of brilliantly coloured marigolds colouring this almost monochromatic setting.

After walking about a hundred metres we reached a set of concentric circles. Each circle had a triangular wedge with a sphere of diameter half a metre on top of each. These were the planets with a sundial in the middle. The planets had been mounted in their positions on 4 October 1957 when the first Sputnik satellite was launched. The planets weren’t to scale with their orbits. If they had been to scale then each planet would be no more than a tiny dot. Each planet was obvious though, especially Earth with its continents, and the Moscow area of Russia very shiny from countless people rubbing on it. Saturn was also very obvious with a huge disk representing its rings. Pluto was noticeably absent even though it had been well known for 27 years at the time Sputnik 1 was launched.

The path was lined with large statues of significant cosmonauts from the Soviet space program. The Soviet Union and United States of America fell into a cold war not long after the end of the second world war. They competed building up enormous arsenals of nuclear arms, more than enough to destroy the world many times over. Another side of the cold war was the space race. Up to the mid-1950s the vast expanse of outer space was completely unexplored.

Tsiolkovsky

In 1957 the Soviets were the first to successfully launch a satellite, namely Sputnik 1. In 1962, they were the first to successfully launch a man into space and bring him back alive – Yuri Gagarin who was put into orbit for a few hours. That being said, in years previous, there had been reports and recordings of radio signals coming from outer space of cosmonauts calling out for help as they were burning in their capsules. This was never publicised as was the policy of the Soviets to never promulgate any negative news.

The Americans lost a few people as well – namely the three astronauts of Apollo 1 who burned to death on the launch pad during a pre-flight test. This lane was a record of the successes of the Soviet Space Program when it was competing against the United States.

There is no longer a space race and the two superpowers are cooperating, with the Russians now providing most of the transportation of people up to the International Space Station.

Russian achievements

The cosmonauts on display included Yuri Gagarin, the first person to reach outer space and return. No Russians have reached the moon – that was USA’s achievement.

We were getting quite close to the very tall 107 metre high tower at the end of the lane. I could see now it had a rocket at the top, and the main structure was the rocket exhaust trail as it headed up into the overcast sky with cloud now starting to break. This was the Space Conquerors’ Monument.

In front of the main monument was the Tsiolkovsky Monument, sitting in front of the main monument looking up the cosmonauts’ lane we had just walked along and looking up towards the sky. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a Soviet rocket scientist who developed the astronautic theories allowing satellites and people to be launched into outer space. He was a recluse by nature living in a log house about 200 kilometres away. He had a hearing problem, so was never accepted into schools. He was entirely self-taught. Considered very eccentric and dying over twenty years before the first satellite, he has been regarded as the father of space travel theory. This statue is the most prominent of the memorials. There is another statue of him outside the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium back home in Brisbane. The most prominent crater on the far side of the moon is also named after him.

A series of steps led to the statue and to the main structure of the Cosmonautics Museum. Just before the stairs was a courtyard with a rectangle of grass overlooked by some pale grey double sized statues of more famous cosmonauts.

The main structure was held up by a dark stone building which turned out to be a museum, though it was closed being quite late in the day. The front of the museum had some quotes on the front, and bas relief carvings of life sized people pointing and looking up to the sky, as those planning the space missions would have done.

Museum

I looked up the main tower. It was leaning over towards the cosmonauts’ lane towering very high. The lean made me a bit dizzy just looking up. The rocket looked tiny from way down here, but I’m sure it was quite an impressively big structure in its own right.

Heading to the back of the structure, the dark stone building holding the structure was angled with windows looking into the museum, though there wasn’t much to see. Banks of grass led back down to the level of the cosmonauts’ lane, so we took some steps down to it, and around to the museum entrance which was shut.

To our left were some impressive Soviet buildings. Pavel gestured me to head over towards them, towards more achievements of the Soviet era.